 Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMworld 2014, brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone, here live in San Francisco, California, VMworld 2014. This is theCUBE, extracting the seeds from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Eric Mielsen. Eric runs all the social media at VMware. Legend in the social media community, Eric. Really have been a big part of VMware's transformation and just build out of overall community, which VMware has one of the most active communities on the planet, very much part of the product development, part of the geekness of VMware, and certainly always keeping you on your toes on social media, Eric, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me, John. I really appreciate getting the opportunity to spend time with you. I know that we've been doing VMworlds for a number of years now, and social is a big, big thing at the show. We have over 100,000 tweets going out. We have videos, hours and hours of videos going out, and so fantastic to finally get on theCUBE and spend some time with you guys. We really appreciate your support, your real visionary and practitioner at the same time. You guys have had a great success, and I got to say, you know, everyone's pushing the envelope and trying new things. I certainly have done that, but you have a tough customer. The VMware community, they're smart, they're active, and they're cool, so you can't just shove stuff down their throat. And they're also introverts, some of them, just saying, and so, I mean, there's a lot of programs that we have to build that have value and have key value. It's not just doing social for social, it's actually doing social to teach, help, learn, build knowledge to the people that are following us and listening so that when you're doing your job and you're going to run a data center that you're in the social, you're in communities in order to get your job done quicker and faster. And I think that's the key value prop that we bring to the program. And we're always saying and trying new things, but the reality is the ones that stick are the ones that actually bring people value. You know, I just want to give you some props. I'm not to stroke you too much here on theCUBE, but we've known each other, and we've worked together for past fires with theCUBE, but I say, you guys have always been good listeners, and I think, you know, we want to talk about what that means now as we progress in social. You guys have always been good listeners to the community and listened to their feedback. And I want, so I want to get your take on that. What have you learned over the years around the true art of serving people in communities, virtual spaces, to physical events, and that art of listening? Well, I mean, it's absolutely clear that you have to be in community, in engagement with the people. You have to love the people, right? And the people have to love you. It has to be a real relationship. And I think some of the comments are, look, if you want to get help done, or if you want to get something from VMware, just tweet it out, and we're there. It's not like robots out there listening. All of the community programs and social programs rerun. We always have a person there. We put our people through training, so we have VCP people that know virtualization. And so when we're engaged with the dialogue in social, it's because we know about what the technology is and what people are trying to do. And I think that's the first thing in listening. It's not really listening as much as it is just being in the conversation and being there and having a passion for what the people that you're talking to are doing. And that makes a big difference. So let's get down to some nitty gritty about what's going on at VMworld. What are you guys doing? Just give some quick tidbits around the social, what's happening here, and what do you guys have doubled down on and what works, what doesn't work? Yeah, yeah, interesting things. One of our biggest programs is what we call a Vexpert program. And that's kind of our lead social evangelist. And you have to apply for it and jump through hoops to get to it. We have over a thousand Vexperts now, right? And that program continues to grow. And that's a scenario where we're building tools and technologies for them to be social advocates. And one of the things we look at in the social program is how can we enable people to be successful in building their own personal brand or their own public brands, right? So that we're not the only ones that are actually doing this social. We're actually helping them do social. So it's kind of like not teaching people how to fish. It's teaching how to people to run fishing boats or fishing fleets, right? And when we do that, that really amplifies the advocacy. It seems like if you think about the supply and demand in social, a lot of the events that we go to, it seems like the supply is really where all the focus is. People say, okay, we got to do something. And sometimes it comes across as gimmicky. It seems like with VMworld, the demand for social consumption is very high. I know, for instance, you mentioned VExports. I know Stu was in my office on Friday and he's like, okay, I got to go pack because I'm leaving this weekend because I'm going to join another VExport. So it seems like the demand is really high for social. How does that change the way in which, first of all, is it a reasonable observation? And how does it change the way in which you approach social? Yeah, I think that is true. We are fortunate at VMware. One, we're not that old a company. VMware is only like 15 years old. And so everything was greenfield for us. So we didn't have legacy systems. And then secondly, we're doing virtual machines and virtual technology, virtual storage, virtual networking and geeky people love to build things. And what a better way to build things, but through software. And so because we're enabling people to geek out and build things and then try things. And it's all in software, which means you don't have to have a lot of hardware to do this. That has meant that the passion to share what you've ever, we're able to build. We have a lot of builders and the passion to be able to share those builds. If you look at most of our advocates and most of our vExperts, they're guys that were in the lab trying things out and then wanted to share them. And because VMware is all software driven, it's easy to do that. And then when you do it, it's easy to share it. And I think that propagated kind of where we have so much traction in the space. And the core is the technical group, John. I mean, they have not lost that core. It's very front and center at this show. I want to ask Eric about some of the trends. I've seen social and you're riding that wave and certainly as Pat Gelson says, if you're not out in front of the next wave, you're driftwood. And you guys certainly have been offensively, aggressively deploying stuff to continue your mission to serve your community and have that connection, that relationship which drives your business model actually. So I got to ask you, you know, we, Dave and I were talking last night about digital 3.0 convergence and how social feels like the web in 96. It's been out for a while, but yet new tooling is coming out and it seems to be everyone's got this new tool and no one wants another tool like a hole in the head, right? So there's all this pressure. So I want to ask you about the infrastructure, the software, is social turning like DevOps for digital? Is there, is there, what's your vision? Well, you know, from my perspective, I think digital, you know, marketing is becoming the trend, right? So pulling all of the different channels together. I kind of like a look at hyperconvergence technologies where you have network storage and physical CPUs. And I kind of apply that industry shift to kind of what's happening around digital marketing, right? Where you do have web and now you do have social and four years ago it was community, right? And these things are maturing and they're maturing into very robust channels just like, you know, video is, right? They're all mature. You have incredibly good people driving incredibly mature organizations through those channels. But now it's has to come together, right? So you're saying they're silos? Yeah, absolutely. They've been kind of silo. I don't like to call them silos. I like to call them mature because they are excellent high producing channels. We'll call them channels. And then the question you got to say is how do you do multi-channel marketing, right? Digital marketing through those channels and what systems and technology do you need to pull those together so you can have a simultaneous campaign that goes through all channels at once? I really think you're onto something here. Dave and I were just talking again the other day about data driven, right? So one of the things we believe in the Cube is this data-first mentality. And if you look at all the stuff that you guys have deployed, there's some healthy, robust, mature community software, blog software. Now you have search engine optimization. These are practices that have been going on and maturing as you said. I'll call them silos, this idea of integrating across them functionally requires some data, data sharing. It requires orchestration. It requires some potentially new SaaS software. That's right. And human resource training and understanding the whole concepts and cross department sharing of knowledge in those tools. So yeah, I think you're right on something there. And you see some of the vendors start to look at this now, right? Some of the big Adobe and others are starting to look at digital marketing platforms that go across multiple channels. But it's a pretty tough thing to do because the channels are very mature and the software is mature. And you have to try, maybe there's going to be some consolidation in the industry around this space. But it's the same message as cloud. You don't want to have a lock-in spec on a platform. Oh, I sold you some software, spend a million dollars, and now I got to use it, but I want to be more, I want to do other things. So there's this openness thing happening as well, right? Yeah, I think so. I think that all of us cringe at the price tags for some of the big solutions that are going to be in this space. And then you know you fear lock-in. And then operational lock-in, and then you start losing agility at the same time because part of the social, part of the communities of these channels, very agile, right? I mean, we can get things out on a dime, right? And so when you start to hyper-converge in this space, how do you also maintain that agility? Dave, this is DevOps. I mean, I tell you we're having a DevOps. Agility, flexibility, openness, performance. I mean, this digital 3.0, this next wave of digital is serious business. It's not like a very gimmicky situation. And what about the data angle? I mean, we've talked over the years about data and metrics and how is that all coming together? I mean, early on there was a conversation, well, what's the ROI of social and return on instinct and where are we with that? Right, I think to come back to John's point, I will use the word silo because when you start looking at data and data reporting, it is very siloed. So my video views are in the millions. I mean, you guys are doing great work on yours. We have bloggers, 20,000 blogs at VMware, alone, VMworld during the session. And if you start looking at these numbers, there's no convergence of the numbers. And none of the platform vendors have figured out how to try to pull this together yet. And look at Twitter and 250 million impressions this show alone. And what does that mean? And what does that mean driving that data to the properties that you want them to consume? So very, very difficult, I mean. There's a lack of data standards. I mean, this is sort of a data governance issue. This is like HIPAA standards in medical. It's almost in social. I got data in my blogs, but I can't use that data fast enough in real time. So I think you're going to see, and I think Dave, we joke about always pimping up our crowd chat, but that's the docker of social media with the engagement container. So we're excited by that. But I want to ask you a different question. I want to get your perspective on that. Let me, let me. One more thing, I would say that we are going to spend more money on solutions like that to make that happen. Awesome. Yeah. Well, great. Could I get a PL right here in the cube? Yeah. The social media world, this is kind of my little hot button because we've been involved in social from day one as you have is the social media guru, right? I mean, that whole sales pitch, you've been sold many times. Sure. What is the things that you don't like about social that you want to kind of get off my lawn kind of thing? Or, and the things that you like about social. Sure. Yeah, I think there's two things. One, I tell people socials like PowerPoint, right? Everybody needs to learn it. Don't think yourself as a PowerPoint guru. Don't think yourself as a social media guru. Think of as governance, best practices, standards, and helping move forward. But the reality is there is no such thing as a social guru. This is just PowerPoint of today's times, right? A native skill. Yeah, that's right. Native skill. Everybody has to do it. And you can be an expert at these things, but I don't like the title social guru. I don't think it exists. And as we move forward, it'll be less and less important. Well, what do you like, though? So I agree 100%. What I like is I love the people, right? And in the end, if you're in social, you should really not worry about the marketing, worry about the love of the people and the engagement and interaction, and the marketing will naturally flow with that. And so that's what I love about it. It's just like everybody that's out there. And the fact that we can engage in, I can engage with 10,000 people just on my Twitter account, and they're all my best friends. So let's go back and take a step back and bring this back full circle. If the cloud, mobile, and social truly become the standard which it is, it's converging. We talked about the data as a challenge and already, what is the value of the interconnectedness? So you brought up a term called being connected, friends, right? So how do you see that engagement piece evolving? Because now you have mobile, different experience. User experience is primary on social. What's your vision around the engagement aspect of social and how do you stay on top of that trend? It is a tough challenge because what's really happening is this matures the metrics, the monitoring of all the engagement. It becomes a marketing tool, and then you start having to deal with the marketing out. And so I think it's a challenge to keep things, content selection, I think it starts becoming key, right? Where you're looking at, you want to select content that is highly engageable but then still has a value prop to all the hyperconverged marketing channels. And so I think that content selection will also become key so you start seeing some of the digital signal on some of these other guys that are building content in products that will allow us to do a better job at high volume campaign marketing with excellent content selection from the social channels. So I got to ask you about the integrated marketing vision. A lot of people are talking about really collapsing in and kind of pulling together PR and comms, corporate communications with social media execution and integrated marketing. Now this brings up the whole omni-channel, omni-marketing, but now you have different operating cycles. PR is out there pumping things up in real time, kind of out in the front lines, might have a different horizon on a three-month cycle, one-day cycle, marketing is more maybe a year. How do you guys at VM where look at that? What can you share with folks that you guys are doing that's innovative in that area? I think that's where we come back to, when you look at these tools and technologies, how do you still remain flexible and dynamic? And I think that's where we are. We have to look at timeline out. You have to look at what is your cadence for content that needs to go out in each one of these. And when you do converge, you have to keep in context that these different timelines exist. I don't think it's an easy thing. I think there will be some amount of non-convergence just because they do have different audience types and different cycles. And so you have to deal with that. So I want to ask you about my favorite topic, content marketing. Buzzfeed certainly got a lot of big round of funding. Native advertising is being called, whatever you want to call it. But now with the social connectedness, where you basically have a social graph of friends and potentially new friends, a new dynamic is evolving. And a lot of companies have been hiring editors and chiefs to come in-house. The crowd layer, of course we know, I rule bias with crowd chef, but it brings up the notion of what is content marketing? You guys have been doing this at VMware. What would you share with folks out there around successes in content marketing and things to do as we go forward to be successful? Yeah, I mean, in the VMware stack, you have to have VCPs. You have to have experts in the products, right? So when we looked at, we don't want to be necessarily in the content production business, this is where we go out to the community and we build platforms that allow us to pull excellent content in from the thousand V experts and also then highlight their brand content and give them credit for that. So share the wealth of our brand with their brand and then pick and choose and have automated systems that pull that content from their channels up into our channels. Yeah, people use the word influencer as a big buzzword. Find some influence and they can market our product. Twitter just put out their earnings and actually highlighted that this new consumption market where the production market is the influencer is actually producers, not necessarily to be sold something. The consumers are consuming independently from the producers. I don't need to go to Ferguson to understand what's happening there because there's people out there on the ground. So an interesting dynamics going on. Do you see that same trend when you just brought this up? Experts are producing content. They're being consumed by the people not in that market. Yeah, certainly we see that. There are a lot of people out there that are just looking to learn and engage where they're not necessarily in our market, but they find themselves in our market learning and that's fine by us. I don't think we do content selection or publishing for those people but we're happy to have those people engage with us. We do tier our content so that if you are new, you can easily engage in channels and content that would allow you to consume it without being an expert in the subject. Eric, Niels and directors, social media and communities here at VMworld sharing some awesome insight around social, really appreciate it. You guys have been great practitioners and also leading the way with innovation. We really appreciate your time. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco at VMworld 2014. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.